August 14, 2006

Hollywood Jock and Aces

Over the weekend I read "Hollywood Jock" by Rob Ryder. It's a year-long journal by a screenwriter trying to sell a script for a basketball movie and get it into production, built off an ESPN.com column that he wrote. I'd never read the ESPN column, but the book looked interesting on the library shelves and so I picked it up. It was okay, but I'm not sure I can be more positive than that. It felt pretty surface-level -- not a great sense of the process of selling a screenplay, and didn't really get inside the author's head at anything more than a superficial level. The projects he was working on seemed interesting, and he had some cool stories about meeting basketball players and Hollywood executives, but I found myself skimming as the book proceeded. Oh well, if you like basketball more than I do, this might be worth checking out.

I also read Aces by Mychael Urban, which is the story of A's pitchers Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, and Tim Hudson, following them throughout the 2004 baseball season, before Hudson and Mulder got traded. Yeah, it's another baseball book, so most of you can skip the rest of this post without feeling like you're missing anything. The book was solid, I really liked it, learned more about Mulder and Hudson and Zito and the A's than I knew before, and lots of cool stories about the job of a beat writer and how players deal with the press. Impossible to read this and not feel like Barry Zito is one of the cooler people on the planet, and that all three of them are pretty good people. That may just be what Urban wanted to portray, but I feel like this was a nice read and felt pretty true, whether or not it is. Obviously you already know whether it's a book you'd want to read or not -- I'd had it on my "to read" list since it came out but it never made it to the library... but when I bought a book which I'll blog about later in the week, I needed something to get to $25 SuperSaver shipping on Amazon, and so this was perfect. Worth the wait.